The Study
Doctoral student Mark Gover and Carol Sue Englert, professor in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education, analyzed the questions and comments of a teacher during a cooperative writing activity with a group of second graders all of whom had been diagnosed with learning disabilities in literacy and language. The goal of the researchers was to understand how a teacher's questions and comments support the literacy development of children who have learning disabilities. The study was part of research conducted the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA).

The Findings
Gover and Englert followed closely the interactions among a student named Ryan, a teacher and a cooperative writing group made up of classmates. Ryan first wrote a draft of a report on cobras. While it had many good ideas, it contained a number of substantive and technical problems. The teacher used this draft to prompt a discussion among members of the writing group. Using what is known as Literacy Environments for Accelerated Progress (LEAP), an intervention that seeks to develop high-level thinking and literacy use among children with learning disabilities, the teacher used questions and comments to spur the children to think about the report itself. She asked questions such as "What does that mean?" and once the children had grappled with the meaning of some of the ideas, she moved the children to think about grammatical/syntactic structure with questions such as "Now, how should we say that?" What the researchers found was that the discussion led to substantive changes in Ryan's text. The final draft of the report was coherent, cohesive and mechanically sound. In fact, through the teacher's talk in the collaborative setting, Ryan and his peers were able to write at the level of their peers in regular education settings.

What It Means to You
Teacher questions and comments such as the ones used by the teacher in the study are not arbitrary or serendipitous. The questions by the teacher and the discussions by the writing group are key intervention strategies of the LEAP project. Do teachers in your district use language in ways that move children¹s thinking and allow them to share the products of this thinking with others?

More Information
To obtain a copy of the full report, you can download it from CIERA¹s Web site at www.ciera.org/ciera/publications/report-series or by calling (734) 647-6940.